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She was trapped.
Andala fluttered helplessly. The full weight of what she had done came crashing down. That was terror, that cold spike in her heart; the same feeling she’d had as a child, when her mother blew out the candle by her bed and plunged her into the black. The same feeling—
Andala realised it a second too late.
Her body was expanding, her feathers receding.No,she thought desperately, trying to call back some of that conviction she had felt down in the dungeons.No,please,no,Iwanttostay,Ineedto—
But it was no use. Just as she had never been able to transform at will before, she could not stop herself from changing back now.
In the space of a breath, she had lost her wings, and she was falling. Andala collapsed in a heap at the top of the staircase, a woman again, a mortal, her body scraping and bruising against the stone steps. The pain in her head had returned, worse than ever, and on her way285down something inside her seemed to have broken. She felt beaten, resigned, as if it could only ever have come to this, and she had been out of her mind to think otherwise.
The stone was cold beneath her. Every inch of her body ached. She was tired – tired down to her brick-heavy bones, bones that, a moment ago, had been hollow and light as air. Andala shut her eyes. Images of Oriane swam behind her closed lids: first the woman, then the bird, one running, one flying, both away from her.
Get up.
A crash echoed in a distant corridor. They were coming. They were almost here.
She couldn’t get up. She was cold and hurting, and alone, more alone than she’d ever been.
But she wasn’t alone, was she? Oriane was alive. Oriane was still here. Her counterpart. Her counterpoint.
Her heart swelled with a rush of feeling – fury, that they had broken that sweet, sunshine girl the way they had; sorrow, that she would not see Oriane’s light again, in the sky or in her amber eyes.
Get up.
Andala wanted to see her again, just once more, before she gave herself up. She had to make sure Oriane was safe, and to tell her – to tell her—
Another crash. Pots falling in the kitchens. Feet storming through the halls. Close – far too close.
Get up.
With a colossal effort, Andala rose. Limbs quaking, vision blurring, she wrenched herself towards the door, hauled it open. She stumbled outside, the door slamming behind her.
There was no time to let her eyes adjust. Unseeing, she ran out into the night, relying on memory, on instinct, to guide her. She fell,286once, twice. She got back up. Her head was throbbing, the blackness spinning before her eyes. She forced herself to keep going, to focus.Thewoods.That was her destination. She could barely remember why—
Oriane.
‘Oriane,’ Andala said aloud.
The sound of the name urged her forward. It echoed in her ears, soothing her pounding skull, drowning out the panicked thrumming of her heart. It sounded almost like a song inside her head. A familiar song, bright and intimate, sung solely for her.
Andala staggered. She was here; she had reached the woods sooner than she’d expected, but her body was slowing now, her breath coming in gasps. Her limbs felt heavy, dead weights threatening to pull her down. Were those shouts close behind her? Were those footsteps? Or were they her own half-sobs and heavy footfalls?
A branch snagged on her clothes. Another scraped across her face. She had made it to the woods. The trees pressed dense around her, crowding, suffocating, black. But she forged on. This was what the night had always been like for her, after all – full of snatching hands, and gnashing teeth, and shadows that sought to drag her into their depths.
‘Oriane,’ she murmured again. The name chimed in the air like a guide, drawing her forward. She repeated it as she pressed on. Her murmurs grew louder, becoming a call: seeking, summoning, her voice twining with the phantom sound of the skylark that sang in her mind.
Andala would have kept running had arealsound not pierced her heart like an arrow, bringing her up short.
She listened in the darkness, trying desperately to make sense of what her body and her mind were telling her. And what they told her was this:287
The song in her head wasn’t in her head at all.
No – if she strained her ears, if she focused all her senses on what her bruised and hopeful heart was saying, Andala could hear it, ringing clear through the infinite night.
The lilting song of the skylark, once more calling the daylight home.288
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